


Sweetness and Light

by ssstrychnine



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Miscarriage, backstory for the wives, nothing explicit at all but the thought is there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-06-22
Packaged: 2018-03-31 08:37:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3971269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wives are spun out of sweetness and light; that's what they are told, that's what they must be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Toast the Knowing

Toast grows up on the Bullet Farm and she finds out exactly where she’s headed when she's around seven years of age. There are not often children at the Bullet Farm, and Toast is uncommonly pretty, and the Bullet Farmer needs a bargaining chip in his treaty negotiations with Immortan Joe. Toast, who is called Toast because the first phrase she speaks is _you’re toast_ before launching herself at a boy twice her size, is told she will be sold to man who doesn't die.

“Everyone dies,” she sniffs, and she counts the years she has left on her fingers. Seven years, well that’s her whole life over again; Toast is unconcerned.

Usually, if a girl is to be sold, she might be swaddled and petted and kept out of the way, but on the Bullet Farm, things are different. Toast dips her hands in gunpowder and draws pictures on the sides of cars and is only reprimanded (slapped sharply across the face) when she touches the Bullet Farmer’s vehicle.

“It’s the shiniest,” she protests, but no one listens.

She plays with guns, she finds the bullets that fit perfectly in the holes, she pulls apart shotgun shells and lights the ashes that fall out on fire. This singes her eyebrows and the Bullet Farmer finally takes notice.

“Don’t damage the goods,” he tells her, and maybe he is talking about the shells but maybe he is talking about her. Toast decides that maybe he is talking about both. She thinks she would like to be a bullet, tiny and fast and blowing little holes in the world. She still tries to fit the bullets to the guns, but she’s quieter about it after that.

Immortan Joe does not become real to her until she’s twelve years old and knows every gun and every bullet in the world. He visits the Bullet Farm to inspect his prize, and she is swathed in white cloth and told to stand up straight. She slouches, she dirties the white cloth. Immortan Joe looks down at her and she wants to spit on his stupid, ugly face, but she doesn't. She puts her hands behind her back and flutters her eyelashes, just like she was told. Immortan Joe _laughs_. Immortan Joe asks if he can have her now. 

“If you can reach your end of the bargain now, we can reach ours,” the Bullet Farmer says, and Immortan Joe changes his mind. 

Toast can count the years she has left on two fingers and suddenly seven years seems like less of lifetime. She plans a great escape but the Bullet Farmer can read minds and he puts her in a room with a lock and bullets scattered across the floor. She plays with the bullets, she counts them, she knows which guns they would fit in, she knows how many shots it would take from each of them to make a person die. 

“Don’t damage the goods,” she tells a handful of the bullets, and she drops them on the floor, and they make the same sound that she heard in her head when she first saw Immortan Joe. An end of the world sound. A two years left sound. 

Toast is a bullet pretending to be a girl. That’s what she tells herself. When she is fourteen, she is sold to a man who cannot die, and she knows that everyone dies, but that doesn't make it any better. There is a girl who is Splendid there and that does make it a little better. Girls arrive and girls are taken away. Toast tells Rictus she knows every bullet in the world and he tells her she must know everything. Toast the Knowing counts the years on her fingers and each year is a lifetime. 

And then one day Angharad (who is splendid and not Splendid) tells them they are not things and Toast thinks, _I’m a bullet_ , and together they start their plans.


	2. The Dag

The Dag is found under the wheels of a truck. She’s been living there awhile and it’s been everything a girl with long legs and long arms and long hair could ever want. A skeleton truck to climb over with bars to swing on and dead buttons to push; with mould in the most hidden corners. 

“Mould is a living thing, and living things are beautiful,” she declares, and she watches it grow across the seat covers, and she eats it because there is nothing else.

There had been others once, a boy who pulled her hair, a bunch of men on bikes; the one who called her a dag because she’d said something he thought was funny ( _stupid_ ). She stopped being funny very quickly when she talked about the blood she saw when the sun set or about how she thought if she pushed someone, just right, they might fall into the sky. 

"The world is teetering on such an edge," she would whisper.

“You’re mad, Dag,” the boy would say, and _he_ would laugh, but the rest of them, the people grown, looked at her like she was the one who’d turned the world to bones.

So they’d tied her to a truck and left her. Told her she could burn under her bleeding sun. And she gets loose and she eats mould and she tells herself that every living thing is beautiful.

She is found by a boy painted white.

“Every living thing is beautiful,” she tells him, her tongue swollen and slow with thirst. The boy doesn't say anything, he picks her up like she is a bundle of twigs, and he takes her over to other painted boys, and he puts her in the back of a car.

“Immortan Joe might think she’s shiny,” the boy tells the others, and they weave their fingers together and bow their heads.

“They told me _I_ was mad,” Dag says, and then she laughs.

Immortan Joe pinches her arms and pulls her hair and dresses her in white. The Dag thinks every living thing is beautiful, but maybe men are exempt from that, because what _he_ is (and what he does to her) is ugly as sin and dead at the edges. She hisses at him and he laughs. She remembers her mould, the only green stuff in a world of yellow and blue (and even that had been mostly brown). 

Dag pretends she has no limbs; she is not a long armed, long legged, long haired girl. She is the mould; she is the green stuff that no one can find, hidden somewhere in the world because it has to be. She stares at the plants sitting on top of the Citadel, and at the things plucked from the earth and served up to her as dinner. The plants are as caged as she is, she thinks. She wonders if anything would have grown from her if she’d died tied to her skeleton truck.

“We are not things,” says the Splendid Angharad, and something in Dag's head quiets.

“ _We_ didn't turn the sky to blood,” she agrees bitterly.

They are four, and then Cheedo comes, and they are five. Angharad repeats her words like the War Boys pray for Valhalla, and like Immortan Joe calls them his treasures, and like the milking mothers don’t say anything. The Dag believes it utterly, but she still thinks they will die. Maybe something will grow from them, maybe they will be shot with anti-seed, and grow anyway, just to be contrary. Furiosa tells them about the green place and the Dag decides it sounds like somewhere for her to put her roots down.

“Angharad, we shall all be green in a green place,” she says, lying in the puddle Joe gave them. She stretches out her hands like they might sprout leaves. 

Angharad doesn't say anything; she lies down next to Dag, in the cool water, and she weaves their branches together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you thank you thank you all. the dag was part of the reason i was so excited for this movie (other than it being a Mad Max movie obviously). I used to follow Abbey Lee's modelling pretty closely. She has an extraordinary face. Anyway. I think Capable will be next.


	3. Cheedo the Fragile

Cheedo is the first and the last. She is a baby, left on the Immortan’s doorstep. Forgotten or not wanted or a tribute. Found by a War Boy and given to the Organic Mechanic, she grows up alone. Joe ignores her while she gets her teeth and learns to walk. Everyone ignores her. She is put in a room and told she best grow up fast, and pretty, or Joe will remember that he does not have a use for her yet. 

Miss Giddy teaches her to read and to write. Miss Giddy tells her about other girls that she will know one day, girls who will be like sisters, and the sisters in her stories are sweetness and light. Cheedo knows that to be a sister is to love and to be loved, more than anything in the world, and she thinks of it constantly.

From ten years old, Cheedo wears a belt. It is a belt with teeth and Immortan Joe tells her it is to keep her beautiful. He visits her sometimes now, and he gentles her with strings of beads and perfect fruit. He tells her that one day she will be his wife (and that means to love and to be loved, more than anything in the world, and she thinks of it _constantly_ ). 

She is given to her sisters when she is twelve, and they are not sweetness and light, but they are everything that she wants. Toast calls her a baby and braids her hair. Dag whispers secrets that she does not understand. Angharad tells her that the belt is not the monster, the person who put her in the belt is. They are cruel sometimes, and she does not understand them sometimes, but they are kind too, and she knows that she belongs with them (and she loves, and she is loved). 

Joe touches her with powdered fingers. Her cheeks, her shoulders, her lips. Cheedo cannot say why it makes her skin prickle now. There were never monsters in the stories she was told. _Once upon a time there was a girl named Cheedo and she was more beautiful than water_. Joe touches her, and he tells her that she and her sisters are his treasures, and that’s why the only men they are allowed to speak to are Joe and his children. Treasures are only treasures because they are so rare.

Joe visits her sisters for different reasons than he visits her. He makes them cry. Capable’s belly swells, and bleeds, and flattens. Angharad carves thin lines into her face like the skeletons of leaves. Toast tells her that this is what being a wife _is_. Cheedo has never been told stories about girls like this, but she loves them, and she is loved, and Joe seems to grow taller, and fiercer, and she trembles when he comes to their vault, because it might be her turn soon. 

Cheedo is thirteen when Angharad tells them they are not property, and Miss Giddy tells her to keep that to herself, and Joe breaks her arm for cutting so close to her eyes. 

“You are my treasures,” he tells them, breathing heavily, while Angharad smothers her sobs. “I am protecting you from a world that has been burned.” 

Miss Giddy tells them what the world was like before. She tells them about the War Boys and their half lives. She tells them about satellites, and flowers, and princesses kept in high towers. She tells them about monsters.

“I’ve been here longer than all of you,” Cheedo whispers in the night, huddling by the windows while Joe visits Dag in their bedroom. Angharad holds her in her arms and lets her cry silently into her hair. She loves, and she is loved.

Miss Giddy tells Cheedo every day for two years that when she bleeds she will be Joe’s wife. Just like her sisters are. Cheedo does not want to be hurt like that. She thinks that she will die if she is hurt like that; she is not as strong as them. They know this truth too, and while it’s Angharad’s words that set them to escaping, it’s Cheedo’s blood that pushes it forward. She is fourteen, and Angharad is pregnant, and Cheedo wakes up to blood on her sheets, the day before a supply run.

Miss Giddy tattoos their names on her skin and arms herself with a shotgun. Furiosa and the milking mothers bundle Cheedo and her sisters onto a War Rig. Cheedo loves, and she is loved, and the blood on her thighs, and the belt at her hips, and her sister’s strength, and her own, take them to the end of the world and back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought I was going to write Capable next, but Cheedo stole me. Thank you for reading!


	4. Capable

Capable is called Capable because her mother dies and she does not. Children like her don’t usually last long, but she scavenges and she scrapes and soon she is ten years old and the raiders notice her again and call her _capable_. She takes the name, though they laugh at her when they give it, and she tells herself that they will keep on laughing and she will keep on living. Because she can, because she has.

She makes herself useful because she has been noticed and she’d rather be noticed in the ways she choses. She is small and she is tough and she hides her hair under a scarf and siphons guzzoline from enemy bikes. She is never caught and she sells her stolen guzzoline for a fair price and she trots along next to the raiders on their bikes, her bare feet bleeding, and they don't tell her to leave, which is basically the same as telling her she can stay. 

Capable remembers her mother and she hides her hair. Her name had been Oxy and she was not gentle, but she was kind, and she had red hair and open legs and that was what she sold for food and for water and to keep her bike running. She used a wheel spoke to tangle up her curls, and she could stab your eye out with it, quick as you please, if you decided not to pay her. Capable is young, but she does not think they will care when they notice her hair, and her legs, and they remember her mother.

When she is twelve, they drive through the wasteland and find an oil refinery billowing smoke. They stop their bikes out of sight, and make a camp, and send Capable in to steal all the guzzoline she can carry. She is caught by the People Eater with guzz still on her lips and a full tank by her side. He stands her up in daylight and he tallies up her eyes and her smooth skin and her hair like blood. The People Eater might have called Capable an omen, if he believed in such things. Instead he calls her an asset, and he writes things about her in a big book, and he sends her to the Citadel.

 _I haven’t died yet_ , Capable tells herself, with a hood over her eyes and cloth bound cuffs so she can’t damage that smooth skin. _I haven’t died **yet**_. 

She is given a belt with teeth and a friend called Angharad and a husband called Joe. Her mother never had a friend. Her mother never had a husband. Angharad tells her what the belt means, and what the husband means, and she doesn’t say anything about friendship, but they are, and they are more, and they are bound. Capable pulls out handfuls of her hair, her blood, until Joe puts her back in cuffs, because she is his _wife_. 

“I haven’t died yet,” she tells Angharad, and the older girl smiles, knife-sharp.

“No, we haven’t,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Capable was really hard! But here she is! Thank you for reading!


	5. The Splendid Angharad

Angharad is Wretched. She and her mother live under the shadow of the Citadel and they take the water when it’s given and they eat insects and cactus and lizards. She has friends; boys with missing limbs who make up games with rocks. She has sun burnt skin and sun threaded hair and her feet are often bleeding. 

“You’re too pretty by half,” her mother tells her, when she grows taller. She sounds worried, but Angharad pays it no mind. There are lizards to catch and she is hungry.

Immortan Joe is an impossible thing, up too high to be really real, water falling from his fingertips like water does not fall from anywhere else. Angharad licks droplets from her lips, crouched low, on the edges of the crowd, and she cups her hands together and thinks that it would be easy to catch all this water in one place and give it to everyone. Maybe that’s the point. Water should not be owned, she decides, and she stands up and screams with the rest of them when the last droplet hits the stone. Her mother drags her back to their dugout, spilling the muddy water she collected in a broken cup.

“You are not to go to the water,” she says. "You're too pretty by half." 

And Angharad shrugs, and takes a mouthful of the water, and sifts the biggest pieces of gravel out through her teeth.

Everyone knows about the War Boys. They are watched and they are chosen, the strongest boy children old enough to hit a drum and take a blow. They are painted white and risen up and they pledge themselves to metallic gods. No one knows about the Wives, except the mothers they are taken from. Girls who have bled, girls who are whole, rare creatures who have avoided the worst of the world’s torments. It’s not the lift guards who spot these girls, it’s Corpus Colossus with his eye to a telescope, picking girls who might bear children that aren’t like him. That aren’t like Rictus. 

Angharad’s mother tells her this in a hushed whisper, under darkness.

“You’re too pretty by half,” she insists feverishly. “I knew a girl who came back hollow, her babies were not whole.”

And she holds out a piece of jagged metal, pushes it into Angharad’s hand, gestures to her face with a slash of her wrist. Angharad refuses. Her friends were not picked to be War Boys and she will not be chosen as a Wife, and anyway, it might be better up there, with all the water in the world.

But she is chosen. A man painted with engine grease and flanked by War Boys walks through the Wretched, and they part for him like he’s in a War Rig. Angharad’s mother smothers a scream by pressing her palms to her mouth. She takes Angharad’s hands then, and turns them over, and over, and tucks her hair behind her ear.

“You are too pretty by half,” she whispers, her voice shaking. “You are not a _thing_.” 

Those words are the last Angharad hears before a War Boy steps forward and takes her by the wrist and another War Boy breaks her mother into pieces like sun-baked sand. The air slows then, the light becomes thick, and Angharad moves through it like she is dreaming. The Imperator picks her up, and she tips her head back, and opens her eyes wide, like she might be swallowed by the sky if only she could see how big it really is.

Angharad is married in white and kept in white. She meets Miss Giddy, and the last things her mother said are swallowed by a fog in her head, and sometimes she isn’t sure she ever had a mother. Sometimes she isn’t sure she didn’t emerge, fully formed, from the pool in her Vault. She learns to read. She has all the water in the world. She cuts lines into her face like the cracks in thirsty sand. Immortan Joe stands above her, and he isn’t real, not really. The only real things are her bare feet, no longer bleeding, and then Capable.

Capable has wild hair and sharp eyes. Angharad shares her bed and her smiles and her secrets. Angharad pulls threads from the fog in her brain like _once I had a mother_ and _once I belonged to myself_ and shares those with Capable too. And then with Toast, and then with Dag, and then with Cheedo.

Furiosa tells them about the green place and everything sharpens and the fog clears. Angharad is flint, Angharad can strike sparks. Capable gives birth to blood clots.

“We are not things,” Angharad says, holding Capable’s hand as she washes her child away. They are her mother’s words, and her own, half a memory and half a thought. 

Later, she says it again. Capable is beside her, and her palm is damp, and her eyes are shining. Dag is tracing flowers into the dirt and blowing dust into the air. Toast has her knees pressed to her chest, and her eyes narrowed, and her toes curled. Cheedo is tucked under Dag’s arm, watching flowers grow, and her lips are pressed together. They are not things. It should be the revelation that it is.

“How does it feel?” Furiosa asks, when a man in a muzzle drives their green place away.

“It _hurts_ ,” says Angharad, and she is not talking about the bullet. 

Angharad is not too pretty by half. Angharad is the scars on her face and the victory in her heart and the blood on her bare feet when she falls under the wheels. She is the flint, the spark, the long road to the horizon. She is her mother and the hollow girls. She is a Wretched girl who eats lizards, and a Splendid one who breaks chains, and she is the footsteps her sisters walk in, after she is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I decided not to write a sixth chapter and just keep this around the girls as they were. Thank you so much for reading this, I have loved writing it!


End file.
